Presentation design
A slide supports the speaker — it is not the script. The audience either reads the slide or listens to you, never both. So a slide carries the takeaway and reads in three seconds; detail goes to speaker notes.
Before and after
The same slide: on the left a “slide-document” you read; on the right a presentation you show.
Key point
slide-documentCoding got faster, but delivery did not automatically speed up
- Review, testing, integration and releases now receive noticeably more changes.
- Weak task framing hasn't gone away — AI just builds the wrong thing faster.
- Without quality metrics the team argues about feelings, not reliability.
- The bottleneck moves: from writing code to framing, verifying and delivering.
Key point
presentationCoding sped up — delivery didn't
- More changes hit review
- The bottleneck moved
- Quality lives on metrics
→ the rest goes to speaker notes (key P)
11 rules
- 01One slide, one idea. The title is a takeaway, not a topic.
- 02A slide is a billboard, not a paragraph. Readable in ~3s.
- 03Read OR listen. Don't duplicate your speech on the slide.
- 04Show, don't list. A relationship → a diagram, not bullets.
- 05A bullet is a phrase, not a sentence. ≤ 7 words, ≤ 4 of them.
- 06A number beats an adjective. “adoption 80%”.
- 07Reveal complexity progressively, not as a wall at once.
- 08One dominant element. Whitespace is signal, not waste.
- 09Fixed canvas, no scrolling. Doesn't fit — cut it.
- 10A deck is a system. One shared layout vocabulary.
- 11Detail goes to speaker notes, not onto the slide.
Density budgets
| Layout | Cap |
|---|---|
| cover | title ≤ 8 words, no bullets |
| bullets | ≤ 4 bullets × ≤ 7 words; ≤ 30 words total |
| intro (cards) | ≤ 3 cards; metric or ≤ 10 words each |
| split | 2 columns × ≤ 3 items × ≤ 6 words |
| visual-only | the default layout; the diagram does the talking |
| any | ≤ 40 words; body text no smaller than ~24px |
The “slide-document” test
A slide fails if any one of these is true:
- a bullet is a complete sentence
- more than 4 bullets or 3 cards
- a card body longer than one line
- title and body restate the same thing
- the text can be read aloud verbatim
- the slide scrolls on screen
- more than ~40 words on the slide
Full guide: docs/presentation-design.md in the repository.